Professor Richard Kelly is looking to harness your casual conversations about the weather, in an attempt to help researchers determine the impact of shorter Canadian winters.

The British ex-pat has always noticed Canadians’ quickness to complain about the amount of snow plaguing their daily commute, and he’s looking to use them as part of an emerging scientific method an emerging scientific method that transforms citizens-at-large into researchers.

Related

Prof. Kelly is asking people to venture into their backyard with a ruler, measure the amount of snow, and tweet their findings and location to his team at the University of Waterloo’s Centre for Climate Change.

The project, dubbed Snowtweets, uses those individual measurements to help verify data from satellite networks, helping them to determine how much of the world’s water is stored in seasonal snow.

It’s information that Prof. Kelly says could help warn local response units of potential spring flooding, averting disasters like the 2011 Manitoba flood which saw thousands evacuated from their homes, costing the provincial and federal governments over $800 million.

The Waterloo team has received over 1,500 Snowtweets since launching the project in late 2009 and will present their findings this week at the Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences.

But Prof. Kelly is banking on an increase in citizen scientists on Twitter over the next decade to help him assemble the comprehensive body of data necessary for drawing conclusions about the effect of climate change.

“We see that the winters are shrinking. The duration of snow on the ground in the northern hemisphere is shorter,” he said. “But what does that mean?

“There are some very interesting climatology questions still to be addressed.”

The team isn’t expecting the tweets to be exact, and will even accept simple observations that report whether or not there is snow on the ground in any given area. But the most helpful contributions follow the Snowtweet guidelines that ask citizens to find a patch of undisturbed snow and measure the depth with a ruler.

Prof. Kelly says he hasn’t heard criticisms from colleagues in part because his research doesn’t depend solely on laypeople. The snow measurements from citizens around the world are compared to official findings from organizations like Environment Canada to give researchers confidence in the satellites that collect the data. He said the tweets will also help fill in the blanks where financially strapped snow measurement researchers no longer cover.

Prof. Kelly sees Snowtweets as a necessary affront to the division between ivory tower researchers and average citizens.

“Social media makes that line very blurred now and we ignore it at our peril.”